Conservation des manuscrits de Dunhuang et d'Asie centrale.

• Author: MAIR, VICTOR H.
• Position: Review

Conservation des manuscrits de Dunhuang et d'Asie centrale. Edited by MONIQUE COHEN. Paris: BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE, 1998. Pp. 169, illustrations, figures. 230 F (paper).

This publication represents the fruits of the second international seminar on the conservation of manuscripts from Dunhuang and Eastern Central Asia. The seminar was held at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris and at Let Fontaines in Chantilly, February 7-9, 1996. Of the twenty-some individuals who participated in the seminar, only one is well known to Sinologists, Susan Whitfield of the British Library. The others are either technical specialists working on such questions as the in situ identification of ancient dyes, the measurement of pH in paper, and chemical degradation, or they are curators charged with the actual restoration and conservation of manuscripts, as well as of paintings and fabrics associated with manuscripts.

The truly global character of the International Dunhuang Project, of which the seminar leading to this book was an integral part, is shown by the nationalities of the chapter authors who are from Russia, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Norway, France, Denmark, China, and Northern Ireland. Four of the chapters in the book are written in French, while the others are in English.

Aside from the purely technical matters of how to prevent deterioration of paper and ink, various chapters of the book deal with how to reinforce the fragile manuscripts so that they can be consulted by scholars and the creation of computer data bases to keep track of the tens of thousands of manuscripts and fragments, describe their physical properties and condition, identify their written contents, and make them more readily available to researchers everywhere.

Particularly surprising to me was the amount of pre-eleventh century backing, patching, and other types of repairs that had been carried out on the manuscripts before they came into the hands of modern curators. Conservation is not just a twentieth-century phenomenon. But these pre-modern...